TII Motorway Service Areas (MSA) Progress Thread

To clarify...are MSAs listed as "one-sided" accessible from both sides of the motorway by a bridge or tunnel of some description, or are they like the Templepatrick services on the NI M2, where if you're heading east instead of west you're just plain out of luck?

Anything going to happen anytime soon with the M9 one at Kilcullen?

marno21 wrote: »

https://www.rte.ie/news/leinster/2018/0124/935640-transport/

The amount of time the case spent in the courts is the clear issue to me. Hardly TII's fault

Remains to be seen - did TII conduct the tender process fully correctly?

I have participated in defining tender processes for public funded projects before - there are ways and means one can distort the competition in order to favour one tenderer over others, or more likely, exclude a tenderer from others.
 I'm not saying this is what happened at all (I have no knowledge of the TII tender process) but there can be reasons why one would not want certain bidders to win (e.g. if they prove difficult to work with and have form at seeking money etc.), or if you want to discourage an incumbent achieving a market distorting position by taking all the available work.

serfboard wrote: »

What's so maddening about the whole Tranche 2 fúck-up is that the case was settled but we, the public who are paying for the maintenance/security on this site (Gorey), don't know what the outcome of the settlement was, so we don't know if the process was tendered correctly, or if Applegreen were just playing silly buggers to hold up the process when they lost out.

If Applegreen were pursuing the latter strategy, it has been successful for them in the sense that their competitors were prevented from operating on the site. However, you would then expect the winning tenderer (Topaz) to sue Applegreen for loss of earnings - this, AFAIK has not happened.

I'd be fairly sure that Applegreen will end up with the legal fees incurred so far.

That the sand has shifted so much under the petrol chains in the mean time hasn’t helped with the delay. The case was settled months ago yet there has been no progress in getting contracts signed since. The fact that Topaz has since been taken over by Couche Tard can’t have helped, together with the fact they have already invested heavily in the new offline M9 station 20 miles from Kilcullen.

A report on the business news on Morning Ireland this morning, mainly about how much the rebranding of Topaz to Circle K was going to cost, also mentioned that they had the funding in place to start on the tranche 2 MSAs.

Fred Swanson wrote: »

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That's the idea of "on-line" service areas, but all of the private ones are "off-line", and thus can be accessed from the local area too!

This is a bit of a problem!

Patww79 wrote: »

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Are they by any chance a load of brand new, large white caravans with equally stylish english reg jeeps? We had them in Arklow over the weekend.